Groton — At the University of Connecticut's Avery Point campus, signs posted on walls inside buildings remind students to wear a face covering and maintain social distancing.

Classrooms are set up for reduced capacity. Desks are spaced apart, and tables have only one chair and a sticker to remind students where they shouldn’t sit to maintain social distance.

In Mort’s Café, the dining facility at the Student Center, arrows and markers on the floor, adorned with paw prints, direct students to maintain 6 feet of distance between one another. A tent outside the facility will provide a space for students to eat, have coffee or take a break outdoors, while inside dining tables also have only one chair.

UConn-Avery Point is slated to start its fall semester Monday, with new protocols in place for the COVID-19 pandemic. Students will have a mix of different options for learning this semester, from distance learning — offered for more than half of the classes — to traditional in-person classes at reduced capacity on the commuter campus.

Campus Director Annemarie Seifert said students returning to campus were required to take a COVID-19 test prior to the start of the school year.

The University of Connecticut has established a public website, called a “dashboard,” that shows the number of test results reported and the number of positive cases. The online portal, available at reopen.uconn.edu/covid-dashboard, shows 155 results have been posted so far for Avery Point, and there have been no positive cases.

UConn Health also provided free testing for faculty and staff who are planning to come to campus this semester.

While the Storrs campus is testing residential students on an ongoing basis, students at the Avery Point commuter campus are only being asked to be tested prior to the start of the school year, though that could change, Seifert said.

Avery Point typically draws students from about 60 high schools across Connecticut, with a heavy presence from New London County, she said. Data is not yet available for this year, but in past years most students typically commute from their parents’ homes, while about 12% rent apartments close to campus.

Students are asked to take their temperature before they leave home, maintain social distance and wear masks, she said. The school also has stepped up its cleaning and hygiene protocols, with frequent cleaning of high-touch surfaces, installing additional hand sanitizer stations and making available cleaning and disinfecting supplies for anyone who might, for example, feel better about disinfecting a desk one more time.

Seifert said the school also is prepared to work with Ledge Light Health District on contact tracing for any cases that arise.

She added that she feels fortunate the school has the 72-acre campus on Long Island Sound, which provides space for people to be physically distant.

Avery Point’s approximately 668 students will have five different learning modalities to choose from, she said.

Distance learning classes, which instructors created this spring and summer, represent 55% of the classes offered at Avery Point this semester, she said. Another 2% of the classes are online courses that existed prior to the pandemic. Another 17% of classes will be in person, with reduced classroom capacity, she said.

And another 17% of classes will be “split,” which means, for example, a class that meets Tuesday and Thursday would have half the students attending in person on Tuesday, and the other half attending in person on Thursday.

Nine percent of classes will be hybrid/blended classes that include "both in-person and online components," as described in the UConn reopening plan.

Once students go home for Thanksgiving, all of the courses will be entirely online to complete the curriculum for that semester and there will be no in-person final exams, Seifert said.

Members of the campus community are asked to take the "UConn Promise" and make a personal commitment to reinforce the university’s efforts, such as wearing a face covering, social distancing, washing hands for 20 seconds and using hand sanitizer frequently. It also discusses respecting the diversity of ideas and opinions that are expressed on the campus and being an ally for an individual who has faced bias and discrimination, she said.

“We’re really talking about helping people think about what it means to be part of a community and what their personal responsibility is and what they could do to contribute to making sure that we can maintain the healthiest campus environment as possible,” Seifert said.

k.drelich@theday.com